NUDES AND THINGS

I shall always remember the first naked woman I ever saw.

Most blokes do.

I mean apart from the more than life-size, torch-carrying black Venuses outside the Victorian South Shields Town Hall, who wore what looked like tea-towels mysteriously draped across their frontispieces. In real life those tea towels, without visible means of support, would have been round their ankles in seconds. The Victorians, so I was always led to understand, were prudish. Not so up in the north-east where these unquestionably well-endowed figures were intended to represent virtue and virginity in the face of and despite long, freezing winters. Idealised women these, ageless, with never a breast that sagged nor a bottom that bulged, not even now after a hundred years. Eat your heart out, cellulite.

Strange, isn’t it, what images stick in the mind? I can’t recall what happened last week but old memories come to my head as clear, sharply outlined and fresh as when they were new – like how did I come to see my first naked woman? Naturally in the course of a long and red-blooded life there have been other ladies encountered déshabillé, but that first one I remember better than any, as though it were only yesterday. Yet it occurred over eighty years ago.

I know it was an afternoon, bright and clear, and I was dying for a wee-wee (you’ll excuse the childish term but that’s what I wanted). I was no more than four- years-old, of that I’m certain, and like most kids of that age (and many men of my age, if it comes to that) I had frequent demands on my bladder.

And that was when I saw my first naked woman.

She was just standing there, staring at me as if she’d never seen me before. After all, there should have been no doubt, because she was my mother, just arisen like Aphrodite from the bath, dripping wet, presumably preparing to emerge.

I didn’t feel the slightest embarrassment or shame.

But I was puzzled.

Those things, those dangly things. What on earth were they? I didn’t have any dangly things on my chest and I know my dad didn’t because I’d seen him with his shirt off. But mam . . .

‘What’s that?’ I said, referring to them as though they were one.

By now she’d changed her position, crossing one thigh over the other as best she could and quickly folding her arms across her chest.

I was wondering if I should get closer to her, and then thought better of it. They might be germy.

I was on the point of asking another question, when suddenly she shouted at me. ‘Get out. Get out at once.’ She pointed at the door and a dangly bit flopped into view.

So I left the bathroom and went off to my bedroom, wondering if I’d done something wrong.

Ten minutes later, fully dressed, she came in, took my hand and we both sat on the edge of my bed.

She must have thought that some explanation was required, and she tried, quite hesitantly. What would a modern mother say in like circumstances? Perhaps in that particularly awful mummy’s voice, something like: ‘Well, darling, mummy and daddy are different . . .’ but instead mum pointed at her breast. ‘Babies get their food, their milk, from here,’ she told me.

But I couldn’t believe it. Why was she saying that? I’d never seen any babies there, and it wasn’t true about the milk because Henry Coxon delivered our milk from the great churn in his horse-drawn cart. I knew that was true because I’d taken the jug out to him on several occasions, and once he’d even let me ride with him and I’d held the reins.

That’s when I started to cry, because it wasn’t true, what mam was telling me. It just wasn’t like her. And I wept and wept. I’ve never forgotten that day.

Perhaps I ought to add that this is not fiction